22/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism, Nature and Ecology

The notion of authenticity, which came at the time of the Enlightenment, was questioned under Postmodernism. In the twentieth century cognition has been replaced by speculation. Jameson asked: is it possible to talk about having a 'genuine self' when we are only representations? Some argue that the self is a natural phenomenon - David Hume and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But for the supernaturalists, such as Carlyle, there is more than the natural in ourselves. Still others have a more ambivalent take, such as Wordsworth.

Romanticism talked of the ecology of the mind as well as of nature, and how these are related. In the early nineteenth century the separation of life from work occurred, resulting in a feeling of alienation. Percy Shelley reacted against the machine and talked of ecology.

In the late twentieth century, Baudrillard signalled a triumph of man over nature. He wrote that representation saturates everything, so it is impossible to tell between the natural or authentic, and the mediated. Representations only refer to themselves, not to other things. These representations he called "simulacra".

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory […]. "
[Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ (1983) NATC 1732-33]

He talks of the "hyperrealism" of capitalism and heightened media society in which desires are created in order to create markets. The natural human has therefore been extinguished, replaced by representational simulacra. It is impossible to be authentic in a capitalist culture.

The Romantics were already familiar with this idea. They struggled with the emergence of hyperreality.

"[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. […] When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it […]."
[Wordsworth, ‘Preface,’ Lyrical Ballads (1800) NATC 652]

Wordsworth expresses what has become a familiar complaint in the twentieth century, that is, of the distraction in our culture, rather than cognition. The romantic return to nature can be thought of in this context. Reality has become sickening because of its separation from nature.

Utopianism, such as in Godwin's Political Justice, is a vision of a morally pure society where people did not work for capitalist machines but went back to nature, surviving subsistently. Coleridge and others also thought up egalitarian societies.

Anti-scientism is the subject of Keats' poem.

"Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade."
[Keats, "Lamia," 231-38]

The poem demonstrates the Romantics' reaction against determination and references.

The idea of organicism became defined as a way of coping with alienation, a ways of recovering wholeness and unity and counteracting modernism. People must become organic structures, where each part is subsumed by the whole, and the relationship of each part to the whole is organic, rather than mechanical. Organic structures are those that cannot be taken apart and put together again while mechanical structures can.

Marxism was a theory that forgot history and how people forget their own history. Organicism as a theory could not explain radical social change, but Marxism could. According to philosophy, organicism cannot explain contingency, randomness and why some things just happen.

"[U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states."
[Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) NATC 1605]

Romanticism was not a reaction against the Enlightenment, but a different way of reaching enlightenment. Ecocriticism argues against this. It insists that all criticism is social, as does Marxism; but that all social issues are related to ecological concerns and are inseparable. Humans are biohistorical creatures, while according to Marxism they are historical. So we are defined by relationships, especially our biological environment. Percy Shelley said of a carnivorous diet:

"The whole of human science is composed in one question:—How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation, be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits, and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being?—I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors, would in a great measure capacitate us for the solution of this important question."
[Shelley, ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’ (1813)]

Shelley used his vegetarianism as a way of rejecting capitalist culture and accepting nature. He expresses the problems of thinking about the relationship between the self and the natural world in this way: by rejecting the exploitation of nature.

Thoreau's reaction is to merge with nature, and accept his dependence on it.

"The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun, and wind, and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford for ever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected […] if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"
[Thoreau, Walden, 1854]

He employs radical anti-Enlightenment discourse. It astonished theorists who saw humans as supernatural, rather than natural beings. The problem with raising a problem is also that is creates a problem, and Romantics were very caught up in this idea. They synthesised this by using natural supernaturalism, which meant that humans were at one with nature but also superior to it.

"It was a plot
Of garden-ground, now wild, its matted weeds
Marked with the steps of those whom as they pass’d,
The goose-berry trees that shot in long lank slips,
Or currants hanging from their leafless stems
In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap
The broken wall. Within that cheerless spot,
Where two tall hedgerows of thick willow boughs
Joined in a damp cold nook, I found a well
Half-choked with willow flowers and weeds. […]"
[Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ (1797-98) 54-63]

Wordsworth's poem enacts the scene it describes; his poetry is also overgrown with imagery, threatening to choke off the human voice. Ecocritically, he does not attempt to humanise the scene but allows nature to run riot. In the following lines, the human mind is an overgrowth of nature:

"Sympathies there are
More tranquil, yet perhaps of kindred birth,
That steal upon the meditative mind
And grow with thought."
[Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ (1797-98) 79-82]

So humans are biohistorical in the poem, not a challenge to our authenticity but a means for it.